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Last week, I saw a woman running on the balls of her feet without letting her heels touch the ground. Looking at her was making my calves and shins hurt. I wanted to share a few tips with her to help her improve her form, but she was wearing headphones and I was scared she would get upset. Her running form reminded me of how I used to run when I first changed my form to save my knees. Unfortunately, I know from experience that it is likely that she will get injured running like that. Coming home, I decided to write this blog post to hopefully save others from doing the same mistakes that I did.

Forefoot Running ≠ Proper Running Form The most confusing thing about transitioning from heel striking in thick shoes to forefoot/midfoot/minimalist/barefoot running is that it is possible to run on your forefoot and still have bad running form. I actually did it myself for about 5 months filled with shin splints, sore calves, ankle soreness, Achilles tendinosis, foot pain, etc. Oh, my knee…

If you stand with your chin up and your chest out, you might appear over-confident, but if you hold your head down and hunch your shoulders, you might look self-conscious and broken down. A good posture is somewhere in between both straight and relaxed. Good posture is about efficiency: all the joints of your body, from the ankle to the spine in the neck, should be aligned in a way that would allow you to stand and move with the less effort possible. Good posture is what allows ballerina to do complex movements in a way that appears nearly effortless. Good posture is required for sprinters to run as fast as humanly possible. It can allow you to stand or sit for hours at work without getting a sore neck or back, or to run further and faster with less effort. Below, I listed all the elements of a good posture taking a bottom-up approach.

1. Alignment
Do your hips, head, shoulders and ankles line up?
Imagine two lines going from the very top of your head on th…

When I just started running, cadence training was all the rage in running magazines and on the Internet. Everywhere you could find videos of cadence drills, music playlists set at 180 bpm and even ads for workshops focused on cadence in your local running store. Running at a cadence of 180 steps per minute was promoted as the miracle solution to pretty much every challenges a runner can face: it will reduce your risk of injuries, stop heel striking, eliminate back pain, make you run faster, etc.

However, we all know that nothing in sports comes easy and that there can be no simple unique solution to so many complex problems. Yes, working on cadence can help, but it needs to be combined with other changes to your running. So what can working on running cadence really do and how can we work for it to help us?

1. The Origins of the 180 Steps per Minute Running Craze Pretty much in every article you will see about running cadence the "magic number" 180 will appear. But where…